To those who say toxic culture is inevitable in scaled online communities: I’d say the web and email are doing well. There is toxic stuff of course but also sufficient tools to screen it out. Architecture matters.
The 'one big playground' model just doesn't work at scale, across two different forms of social media (Twitter and Clubhouse) it just descends into various forms of tribalism.
90's era forums actually had things figured out quite well as far as just the right amount of async and just the right amount of separation, there was a larger forums 'ecosystem', forums would invade the other sometimes but there were clearly defined community walls
The screening component is subjective though. At a certain point discretion by an individual or entity is made as to what is toxic and what isn’t. I do agree that toxic cultures can be mitigated with the right tools but context is everything.
I love this and I feel the promise of FC is the ability to opt out/in to scaled and subcultures with more control ease. I also believe culture is set by first movers, and the folks who started the internet believed in principles and decorum that thankfully persist today. Grateful FC started this way too.
The biggest difference imo is that with networks like the web and email, you engage with content/communities you deliberately searched out. It’s the difference between: Users saying “hey computer, I want to see X.” versus Computers (algo recommenders, etc) saying “hey user, you want to see X.”
+1. been thinking about how FC’s architecture draws on the positive aspects of culture, turns them to our collective advantage, and leaves behind the negative aspects as we build together. excited to think of FC as a critical vehicle for wider cultural change. the earliest evidence is FC’s cultural evolution from
Yeah that type of thinking assumes we have no agency in this. Nihilistic. Boring. We can build things to weed out the toxicity.
Solving spam was critical for the longevity of email (and you could argue that google did the same for the web). Wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t open architecture that allowed for competition in the client (and public evolution of the protocol, eg DKIM).
love this idea. Internet Architecture : Digital World :: Laws of Physics : Physical Word
Behance is and has been one of the largest communities for visual artists (as you know!) - and we worked hard to cultivate a culture of appreciating vs competing. It worked.
I believe that incentivising positive interactions and behaviours on social platforms is offering us a glimpse of what the internet should be, could be, will be. The era of profiting from hate is coming to an end.
Values based social design does this. Standards are set and reinforced by the community
It’s a rampant problem in games. Me & @daes are building @gg which is infrastructure to tone this problem down
What do you think foments toxic culture on Twitter/Facebook? Algos which make toxic content viral?
Hasn't email become a closed garden where big tech act as gatekeepers? Is it viable to expect your e-mails to be delivered through a provider that doesn't have a partnership team with the other big inboxes? Spam is also worse outside Gmail...
Also YouTube comments went full 180 from terrible cesspool to pretty positive vibe
True story! If your biz model depends on toxicity, you have no choice but to tolerate it at the minimum, and embrace it at the max. Email doesn't have a biz model (since its a protocol), so clients were able to implement filtering b/c users demanded it.
But I think human choice comes into play here as well. We curate the people in our circle. If we can’t actively curate non toxic people, we cannot expect platforms to do the work for us. Who we engage with and surround ourselves with is always up to us.
What do you think about communities in reddits? I generally think that moderation is needed to keep the toxic stuffs out, but moderation should be done by individual communities who define their rules.
100%. Architecture matters a lot. I've both seen a 5 people toxic group chat, and a 10k people-filled stadium cheering with positive vibes.